This week, I have discovered a Norwegian band called Kintama. This four-peice band is inspired by Kurosawa films, and their album “The Silencer” tells the tale of a fictional video game filled with underground Tokyo, samurai, ninjas, and mob lords.
The song I’m featuring here, “She Likes it Vindaloo” is track seven, after the initial character development, and into the action of the story.
Kintama has a sound like American hard alternative rock, like the Foo Fighters.

There was a post at GoingToOahu talking about the desktop widget for Kayak. I’ve been a fan of Kayak for years, and always check there when I have occasion to get away, out of curiosity, or just double-checking prices for someone else.

Kayak is a travel spider, meaning that you use it to do your search for air travel, hotel, rental car, etc, and it takes your query and uses it to search 140 sites, including the airlines, rental companies, hotel chains, and places like travelocity and hotwire, etc. The beauty of this is that you only search once, and then you get a full, sortable grid of all the results. When you find the deal you want, clicking just takes you to the website that offers the deal you wanted. No funny business.

Something I discovered recently while looking for a deal on a hotel stay for a road trip was the new maps. They have done a lot of work getting it integrated with Google maps. This view shows the properties mapped out in the area, and at the bottom of the map is a google search. Entering the name of a point of interest in the search box marks it on the map, so that you are able to see how far each possible property is from your chosen activity, and of course, all of the markers that Google maps already has in place. It’s a very nice feature, and I haven’t seen it elsewhere.

Does this mean I’m “difficult”?

Your result for The Heart Test…

Pragmatic Heart

Take The Heart Test at HelloQuizzy

Some of you who have been around for a while, or have been on road trips with me will see this selection and might wonder ‘whassupwiddat?’. I have three points on that, which I’ll get into after an overview for the less initiated.

While we all tend to be music snobs after years of drilling down into many bands and b-sides, exploring the dark inner circles of the old banged-up record store, and raiding estate sale closets for obscure genres that we’d never have found on our own, I have a well-voiced music snob pet peeve for remakes. This is the point where those who have heard my arguments on them have their eyes glaze over, so I’ll put the full arguments on parade in another post.

My reasons for choosing a cover song to be highlighted this week? First, it’s a true cover. The lyrics are blissfully un-messed-with, the notation remains, but the style has been conformed to the artist. When this is done correctly, it can often lend whole new meanings to the same song or arrangement. Second, It’s K’s birthday, and I felt that a girlband that rocks, and that breaks out with intense energy and a fresh outlook was just perfect to celebrate her big 7th. Third, The other song by Odd Girl Out that I was going to use really kicks in at about 27 seconds, so the demo clip you get here would not do it justice.

Odd Girl Out is a post-punk pop all-girl band from Baltimore who sound a lot like Joan Jett or Letters to Cleo. I got the cover of the Bangles’ Eternal Flame on spotlight here as a dedication for the people in our lives who can light up our whole day just by saying our name.

When you guys finish with your personal flashbacks to big hair, DeLoreans, and jokes about Regan’s memory lapses, Hit the “More From This Artist” button to hear clips of some of their other tracks, including a really kicking “Lost in Translation”, a playful nudge at home in “Smalltimore”, and even an ode to “MySpace”.

A couple of funny things:
The “You dropped your bible” video is a takeoff from a posting at craigslist. When the page loads, just hit the embedded video.

DJ Spock!

Some interesting pictures that came up when doing a search for “oops”. It didn’t specify if this was a GIS-only or not. Some of them were new, which was rather surprising, actually.